It Never Hurts to Ask

So we got our contract absolved yesterday with the house with oh-so-many problems. We were very surprised that the guy let us off so easy: the Dayton contract is very ambiguous when it comes to allowing either party to terminate the contract, for whatever reason. We were soooo relieved, but still sad. I feel like the guy who admires this really cute girl from afar and decides to ask her out and while she's not perfect things are going great so he finally gets up the nerve to pop the big question only to be told that her insides are infested with cancer and the doctors think her chances for survival are slim to none. The seller stipulated only that he be privy to copies of the inspections. Like, uh, sure: You need all the help you can get. We really don't think the guy realized what a mess the house was in; for all we know, he never even used the toilets and didn't realize the contractors who put down the floors never bolted them back to the ground. But that's the least of his problems.

In the meantime...
We have another contract on a house! Before we moved on to what we felt like were reasonable homes in our price range we decided to low-ball some homes in a neighborhood we fell in love with that is near the school Conner was supposed to attend. We figured, it never hurts to ask, right? And we won't spend much time on it: there were only three houses we had our eye on (not many houses for sale in this neighborhood, period; people move there and don't want to leave) and we'll just give them each our offer and then move on after they say no. We never expected anything to come of it, but we felt like we at least had to try for a chance to stay in that school zone since nothing else right in our price range was available (that we were willing to make an offer on). And since we've looked at every house there is for sale in our price range, we should know.

We weren't the only ones surprised that the first seller we asked accepted our offer! (Like, why didn't we do this earlier?) I believe our realtor's words were, "Well, just call me a Doubting Thomas." We were a bit stunned, to say the least; we also felt like, uh, maybe we should go look at the house again? We had seen the inside once before, but it was many days and many more houses ago. We were also in such a hurry that we forgot our camera so, no, no pictures yet.